Rumor Roundup: The snake is eating its own tail

When one of these rumor blogs appends (updated) to the end, you know it's got to be amusing. And it is: according to the article, this schematic "more likely refers to some aspect of the device's flash memory." Egg, meet face.

The same leaked schematic had all the rumor blogs beating the NFC drum again, but even AppleInsider says "the details seem questionable" and had to append its own little [u] to this article.

All around, this scenario proves that in the rush to be FIRST!, the rumor blogs aren't at all interested in being right. This isn't anything new, of course - this nonsense has been happening for years - but it's certainly an easy thing to point to and say, "You see? This. This is how you are doing it wrong."

Some analyst issued a "note to investors" based on his reaction to a report from the Wall Street Journal, a report which was itself just a rehashing of the various analyst-sourced rumors from the past month.

The snake is eating its own tail... wait, that's not a snake. Ewww. Someone pass me a bag of kitty litter and a shovel?

Some analyst comes out with some ridiculous claim for sales numbers for the next-gen iPhone. Said numbers likely weren't pulled out of the air, but rather from somewhere far less savoury. And although it's patently obvious that this guy is just making stuff up and is merely one of many "analysts" trying to manipulate Apple's stock price ahead of the launch, you can always count on the rumor blogs to report this BS anyway as though it's legitimate news.

Analysts don't know what they're talking about when they talk about Apple. Nothing they say matters. At all. The world will not weep if you stop spreading their idiocy.

The source for this report is some random guy on Twitter. Sounds legit! Except for the whole "random guy on Twitter" part, that is. TUAW's (update) is, unlike most of the [u] appends I see, additional confirmation of its initial report rather than the rumor blog style non-apology apology about getting it wrong. This confirmation was "a second source via IRC," which I suppose is a level of legitimacy above Twitter, but still.

For its part, 9to5 Mac claims they've confirmed with "sources close to the situation" that "there is no truth to the rumors." They should know; they're the foremost experts on untrue Apple rumors.

More analysis of the supposed logic board for the next-gen iPhone claims it will feature improved networking speeds compared to current models. This is one of those rumors that seems mundane enough to be plausible at first blush, so we'll see.

A leaked photo from a Russian source claims the next-gen iPhone display will have a 1704 x 960 pixel display. However, cursory analysis shows the Russian claim is inconsistent with a 4.7-inch display size. Rather than dismiss the claim as BS, MacRumors immediately leaps to the conclusion that the 1704 x 960 resolution is meant for the as-yet-unconfirmed 5.5-inch iPhone 6, and it assumes a 1472 x 828 resolution is meant for the 4.7-inch model based on iOS 8 references to a display with that resolution.

All of this is to say that we're presumably less than a month away from the launch of the next iPhone, and the rumor blogs actually have no clue at all what the features of the device will be, right down to its display resolution. Hilarious.